Tuesday, February 18, 2014

The Defense Department has awarded a three-year, $40.5 million joint enterprise licensing agreement, called a JELA, to CDW-G to provide Adobe products to the Army, Air Force and Defense Information Systems Agency.

The agreement, which gives 2.6 million personnel one contract vehicle for Adobe technologies, is part of DOD’s effort to cut costs, streamline acquisition and ensure interoperability of products. DOD’s first JELA, a three-year, $617 million agreement for Microsoft products, also for the Army, Air Force and DISA, was awarded in December 2012.

“The JELA is a best practice approach to answering enterprise software requirements for the DOD and joint operations," Lt. Gen. Michael Basla, Air Force chief of information dominance and CIO, said in an announcement. The agreement is expected to save $16.6 million over the three-year period, Basla said, and will allow the services to modernize their process through the Adobe products, which include Acrobat Pro, Experience Manager Document Services, and subscriptions to several Creative Cloud tools.

The services will be able “to move beyond electronic versions of forms and begin transforming business processes using online, fillable ‘smart’ forms tied to databases," he said.

Standardizing on Adobe’s PDF format, for example, will help improve information sharing, Army deputy CIO Michael Krieger said in the announcement.

DISA, which served as the lead agency for the contract, is in talks with vendors about other JELAs, agency CIO Dave Bennett said.